We Still Need to Talk about the Murder of Halla and Orouba Barakat
[This article has taken me three years to finish. It has been three years to this day since Halla and her mom were murdered. I believe that we still haven’t heard the whole story. This is only one small piece, and only represents how I knew her. There are still so many more parts for others to tell.]
When I was 17, I met a girl who would change the course of my life. Her name was Halla Barakat. She was a hazel-eyed, Emirates-educated, American-born Syrian girl who intimidated everybody from the second she stepped into the room. The year was 2011, and the revolution in Syria had just begun. Halla and I were gathered at a conference of Syrian revolutionaries convening in Istanbul, Turkey. Her mom was an activist, and my mom was an activist- we were their hopeful teenage daughters- ready to join the struggle for freedom in our homeland.
We first connected after attending the same workshop about Bosnian youth in the nineties who used graphic design to capture their revolution when no one could understand it. Halla and I instantly clicked. She knew all the Syrian revolution chants in Arabic and all the words to my favorite Beyonce songs. She understood these diasporic quirks and inconsistencies that come with being from the U.S. South as Syrian girls. We had both had lived in the Emirates too. She carried herself with such grace and had an instant confidence that could magnetize a room.
She refused to squeeze herself down for anyone. When someone is so fully themselves, they teach you to confront the limits you have participated in imprisoning yourself in. She made me want to take more spontaneous adventures. She made me want to be more in love with the world. She dared us to name the dreams that we came to believe were impossible. That is the purest kind of love someone can show you.
That summer, we stayed up late nights in Istanbul playing backgammon, talking revolution; live-streaming the Syrian protests, tweeting, exchanging the sacred codes teenage girls use to talk about our hearts and souls, our losses. She was fearless and I tagged along. She would grab my arm and lead me through Istanbul’s alleyways. Together we ate dondurma, wandered into artist studios, and explored parks that looked like heaven. It was Halla’s idea to jump on the bus downtown and join a protest at the Syrian embassy. I was nervous about shouting too loud.
We were gathered for a conference that brought together Syrian revolutionaries with exiles from previous generations. We convened in Istanbul while Skyping in our sister conference in Damascus, which was raided by Assad’s secret police. They massacred twelve of our activist comrades who were meeting in Damascus, may their souls rest in peace.
The conference ended up fracturing itself in a way that eerily foreshadows what happened in the Syrian revolution. The old guard of returning exiles and ex political prisoners were using tired slogans from the days of pan-Arabism. Kurdish activists rightfully staged a walkout. Then, the remaining Syrian youth decided to create our own activist circuit called the Syrian Youth Activist Network because of the perpetual ageism and invalidation from the previous generations. I noticed during the proceedings, that not one woman spoke. I brought it up and one Syrian woman told me, “You’re being so naive. Gender is something we will talk about later, after the revolution.”
We were constantly getting in heated debates at the conference about diaspora, authenticity, exile, and return. Some men were so threatened by Halla as she took up space as a young Syrian speaking vocally from her position in diaspora. “What do you little girls think you know about Syria? You have no right to speak!”
Halla was full of poetic ruminations about our state as diasporic beings. “We did not choose to be ripped from our homes. You are blaming us for existing. Exile is not something I created for myself. The fact that Banah and I even exist, as Syrians who were forced away from home, the fact that we are even here is a reminder that you are wrong. Because soon other Syrians will face exile and feel at a loss for how to participate in the revolution. I am only alive because of those who died so that I could be standing here, in front of you, free. What are we supposed to do? Mute ourselves because we are far away? If anything, we have to spread the stories and find a way to make people care.. So we must speak. It is our obligation. Iltizamna.”
The certainty in her voice was brilliant and wise.
We think our removal means we are not still connected to our homes but it is our removal that grounds us in who we are, even as power systems convinces us that the loss was inevitable. Our souls hold a particular instinct, a compass that Halla was so wisely attuned to. Our souls are aware of where we Are and where we were Supposed to be. Halla knew that the threat of violence follows us, and this is what she was always saying we should understand. We Syrians who were barred from Syria precisely because we are Syrian.
A year later she would share about her cousin Omar Bkeiriti in Idlib who was martyred. “He was like my brother. And they took him away. For walking down a street and shouting words. For wanting to be free.” Then in 2015, another cousin of hers, Deah Barakat, would be the victim of an Islamophobic hate crime in North Carolina. There is a key linkage Halla’s world makes between Syrians in the Middle East and our subsequent racialization and sexualization in diaspora, and how violence follows us when we cross through so many intersections of state suppression.
Halla was an incredibly talented media guru and filmmaker. She took her digital camera everywhere we went. You can tell which photos from that summer are Halla’s, because they are bathed in a warm light. You can see the way Halla saw the world, lush, green, and full of hope.
It was like she could see past, present, and future all at once. She could capture reality in a way that made it look like a dream. She could see what was there and see at the same time, what was larger, what was yet to be dreamed.
The only time I ever used hashtags was when I was with her. She would literally plop a computer in my lap and ask me to document what we did, that it was important to tweet and Facebook everything. People would belittle that work, but she had the foresight to understand the epistemic significance of recording our own archives. Looking back now, those posts are all I have from that historical period at the beginning of the revolution.
She was also an incredibly spiritually attuned Muslim who believed in the power of people to transform the world as we know it.
For every debate, Hala already had a thought-out response she would deliver with such heated energy that it was difficult not to consider her certainty. It was never “if the Assad regime falls..” with her. It was was when the regime falls…. “when we go back to Syria, when you and I return one day, I will show you the beautiful countryside of Idlib. Oh Banah, it really looks like heaven. I can only imagine what it will be when freedom finally comes.”
We stayed up all night watching Titanic together on the last night. She asked me, “what do you want to do? Who do you want to be?” I hadn’t really asked myself those questions before. I had never allowed myself to name my desires, to put out the intention in the universe and outline it with such courage. Halla told me, “Don’t spend your life doing what other people want you to. Go be a writer, or an artist, studying something no one else has.” I was about to start college and had been planning to do computer science or environmental science to appease my parents. I came back to the U.S and signed up for all the women’s studies classes I could.
She told me her hopes and dreams with clarity and determination. “I want to go to the Sorbonne. I’m practicing my French so I can go there and study political science or international law. I love seeing Istanbul on this trip. I feel like I need to move back here and work. I’m going to become a journalist. When Syria is free, I’ll go back. I’ll study international law and human rights. That way years from now, I can prosecute Bashar al-Assad personally in the Hague. I can’t wait to see the day.” My heart breaks because she graduated with her degrees in political science and international relations and had recently moved to Istanbul with her mother to continue her career a journalist right before she was murdered. I wish she got to see the rest of her dreams come true.
After leaving we heard from a friend of ours that men at the conference spread a rumor that she and I, the youngest women, were there to sleep with the activist men. That we were there to “distract” the men from their “real” revolutionary work and that we were “sluts.” I was bewildered because I had been incredibly shy and quiet the entire time and hardly interacted with men outside of my cousins and uncles who were there. Halla was enraged. She said it was sexist, and that we had a right to be upset. I was horrified to tell my mom because I internalized that it was my fault somehow because of how I looked or behaved. She promptly told her mom, Auntie Orouba, who told us “let them talk. People will always talk when you’re great.”
“There are people dying in the streets in Soreeya, dying to be here. And they are nervous about us showing our hair and skin, and laughing too loudly and speaking up too much?” Teenage girls are always assumed to be excessive and unaware of patriarchy. Halla took it more seriously than I did and I’m glad she had that moral compass. “These men, with entire families of their own, just see us as flirtatious voices looking for attention, when we just want to say the names of our cousins who died and the political prisoners in our family who were disappeared. It’s like they’re not even hearing us.”
Throughout the years, Halla and I kept in touch. She was my first Syrian revolution friend, and by the end of our time together she felt like a sister to me. I was thankful that the movement introduced me to such a powerful group of revolutionary women. The last thing she ever told me, after I graduated college as Valedictorian with degrees in Comparative women’s studies and sociology, was: “I’m so proud of the woman you’ve become.”
September 19th, 2017, Halla and her mom were returning home from work. They arrived to their apartment in Istanbul, Turkey like any regular day. Halla’s mother, Dr. Orouba Barakat, busy finalizing the launch of a grassroots Syrian women’s organization that was set to open the week they were murdered. Halla had recently graduated with Bachelors degrees from Sehir University. She had just landed her dream job at a new place as a journalist — previously she’d been working for Orient TV since 2015, an alternative media outlet known for Syrian news. For weeks, someone had been leaving them threatening messages on their phones. Both mother and daughter were outspoken, passionate activists who spent their lives protesting abuses of power. It was clear someone who disagreed with them attempted to intimidate them and incite fear. Close friends and work colleagues raised alarm when Halla and Dr. Orouba stopped answering their phone. On September 19th 2017, Dr. Orouba and Halla Barakat were brutally murdered in their own home. The Turkish media only reported a mother and daughter were murdered in Al-Asya’a neighborhood due to mysterious circumstances.
Friends fought for several days to enter the home. According to reports, the landlord would not let friends open their apartment unless they filed a police investigation, but the Turkish police would not release a report or any statements. On September 22nd, concerned community members finally got into the apartment and discovered the mother and daughter’s bodies. According to Huffington Post Arabic, there was evidence that it was not carried out by one murderer, but by a team of men. They were stabbed repeatedly. There are reports the women were strangled with cords. Some reports detail the women had their throats slit open with knives. The only confirmed detail is that the murderers attempted to conceal the crime by covering their bodies with heavy amounts of lime-scented deodorizer. As if they could wipe it all away. As if the world would not immediately notice the loss of our revolutionaries. Little do these men understand, Halla and Dr. Orouba left the imprint of their souls on the world everywhere.
We do not know who committed this heinous act. What we do know is that Halla and Dr. Orouba were vocal opponents of the Assad regime. They were also outspoken against ISIS and extremist forces, and spoke up for their journalist friend Kayla Mueller who had been murdered by ISIS. We also know some men in the community disagreed with their voices. (See: Case of American journalist and Syrian mother murdered in Turkey botched by Ertan Osman). My gut instinct felt deeply, based on the level of coordination and force, along with the suspicious reticence of the Turkish police and forces, that this was an act of the Assad regime. It was not unheard of, and had happened before, in the 1980’s — regime forces could and had followed activists such as the Tantawi family to their homes, in diaspora, and murdered them in their homes.
To strangle someone. To slit their throat. There is a particular kind of threat a woman who speak the truth of herself poses to a world bent on silencing her. We are shamed for speaking too loud and wanting too much from the world. They try to scare us with these grotesque attempts to symbolically reinforce what happens to women who dare to speak. Whoever it was, they carried out a calculated and extensive violence assuming it would not spark international outrage.
And the frustrating part is that it mostly didn’t. International headlines mostly emphasized Halla’s American citizenship and the mother and daughter’s relationship to Kayla Mueller. They did not mention that the women were known in our communities as feminists and passionate organizers against the Assad regime. The articles written by some men that I read in Arabic roughly framed them as “innocent butterflies” and focused on Halla’s name, which means sweetness. Halla was so sweet, don’t get me wrong, but she was also sarcastic, hilarious, dark, a classic Scorpio, outspoken, direct, eager to plummet into the shadows and depths of the human experience… It disturbed me because Halla and her mom’s fierce warrior spirits were reduced to notions of gendered purity. There were apologies on Halla’s facebook wall from male friends who had been arguing with her before her death that she did not face real threats of violence as a Syrian woman. It enraged me. I did not want the same men who were constantly invalidating Syrian women to be the ones eulogizing them. I did not want the outside Western gaze that already painted Syria as an indecipherable catastrophe to be the ones framing her story.
In Syria, our regime is responsible for 91.4% of total casualties[1] and yet the situation is perpetually represented as chaotic, unknowable, and erases the brave Syrian women and men whose resistance fueled the revolution and it erases the regime’s subsequent genocidal response. Edward Said (1978) famously explained the more, “mysterious,” and inaccurate the language used to depict the Other, the more alien the Other becomes. Even an at-a-glimpse sample of daily news coverage on Syria reveals confusing headlines like “Syria strike: site of chemical attack hit again,” (CNN) “Despite U.S. missile barrage, Syria continues airstrikes against rebels,” (Washington Post); “U.S.-Led Forces Reduces Attacks on ISIS in Syria After Airstrike”; (New York Times). What started out as a peaceful struggle against a decades-long authoritarian regime, what has always been a clear story of resistance against that regime quickly became a muddled and normalized extended background of “war.”
These representations of “the Syrian crisis,” normalize the conflict in Syria based on an assumption that we mysteriously live in a perpetual state of war. Words have the power to shape our real lives. The erasure of an active grammatical subject is no coincidence as the U.S formalizes bans against Syrian entry to the U.S. and as it forcibly enters their homes in Syria, homes already under the totalizing terror and uncertainty of the next Assad regime or Russian allied barrel bomb strike, gas attack, or sniper from an extremist faction being the difference between life and death. We are under attack from all sides. The activist labor of Syrian women catapulted Syria into revolution, and yet it is their voices who are most often erased.
My cousin Nusaiba was staying in Istanbul and had been working with Halla’s mom. She attended the funeral and participated in the customary Muslim ritual of the community picking up dirt to lay on their graves. Except when Nusaiba picked up her handful of dirt, the imam presiding over the funeral publicly yelled at her and said this is something women are not allowed to do. There is nowhere in Islamic scripture, in the Quran, or in hadith that says this. I was enraged when I heard her experience because I knew Halla would be too. Even in death, they were not allowed to rest.
One of Halla’s 19 year old cousins attended the funeral and was crying profusely. A week later, in a bizarre series of events, he ended up confessing to the murder. It was a strange story — he said, contrary to the forensics evidence, that he alone carried out the murder because Halla’s mom “owed him some money.” Suddenly the story, which already had been framed in a frustrating way, was dismissed in the larger community because it was “domestic violence and not political.” Even if it was domestic violence, gender based violence is political. There was a way in which the story became relegated to the private. It felt like no one but her friends and community could see how this was so deeply coordinated in what felt like a politically motivated assassination. I believe that her cousin was pressured by a coordinate force to confess. Perhaps he did play a role, but there was no way he carried it out alone. Also, the regime is known to pit people in the family against each other using blackmail and threatening their lives.
Like many Syrians, Halla and Dr. Orouba were part of a long line of community who were outspoken in struggles against the Syrian regime and the occupation of Palestine. Halla was a young woman with a long history of firsthand organizing experience. She traveled to refugee camps and documented the heartbreaking realities of hunger and violence many Syrian children were facing in Turkey. She wrote countless articles — some of which I have included here. She served as the delegate for the state of Free Palestine at Model UN delegations for students internationally and her mother served in the Syrian National Opposition for a time. They regularly received death threats from supporters of the Syrian regime.
Halla and Dr. Orouba were Syrian women who were forced away from their homeland for sharing the stories we were supposed to forget. They spent their lives broadcasting news of injustice.
Dr. Orouba had a long activist career that built important connections between struggles for freedom transnationally. She was exiled from Syria for refusing to remain silent about the human rights abuses Bashar al-Assad’s father, Hafez, committed during the 1980’s. In the early nineties, Dr. Orouba was part of a delegation of journalists in the Middle East who met in Beirut to discuss how to fight U.S. and British imperialism in the wake of the Gulf Wars, while also how to fight Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime. She was hosted by the Iraqi Community Party and took a boat down the Tigris where she and fellow journalists survived an attack by the Iraqi military who were targeting them. She traveled to Kurdistan and documented Kurdish revolutionaries’ intifadas and grassroots resistance against Ba’athist regime in Iraq and Syria. She risked her life returning inside Syria to travel to Qamishlo, a predominantly Kurdish area in Northeast Syria and with the delegation of activists to help broadcast and document the stories of Kurdish resistance to policies of Arabization.
Halla and Dr. Orouba are remembered by many as the beloved, magnetic mother-daughter duo of dreamers, known across the Syrian community for always standing at the front line of protests, shouting with the loudest voices, women unafraid, chanting freedom’s name. Halla and Dr. Orouba shared stories of people who experienced the brutality of Assad’s prison system. They fought against the extremist forces that co-opted the dreams of our revolution. I am reminded of the film by the Syrian revolutionary feminist collective, استيقظَت Estayqazat, called When I heard my voice. Syrian women describe how speaking up for the first time empowered them to challenge power against patriarchy in their intimate lives too. In speaking up, they did what the brave women and children of Dera’a were brutalized and tortured for at the beginning of the Syrian Revolution. They dared to dream, and in dreaming, they taught us exactly what freedom means.
In the time we spent together in Istanbul, Halla had an idea to organize all the youth whose voices were not being heard. She wanted to record our hopes and dreams for a future Syria. Some didn’t see the point but went along with it. She wrote the script for this short film and encouraged us to contribute our ideas. I could not think of anything, so she wrote me the line — ”In a future Syria, my voice will not be a whisper.” I could not think of a more prophetic thing to say. She helped direct it, edited it, and uploaded it to youtube. Like so many of our creative projects, it remained unheard, unlistened to.
I look at it now filled with a new kind of hope. I am so thankful she knew to record that moment in history. A moment when Syrian youth in diaspora, from France, Turkey, youth who had just crossed the border, from all over the world, could join together and affirm our existence as in betweeners — exiled and refusing to forget.
We are the women who are told our dreams are hallucinations. We are told we are too idealistic, naïve. And yet it is our voices that incite fear to the point of violence… we are the ones the leaders are afraid of. We are part of a tribe of revolution women who find solace singing Azaadi, Azaadi. Halla and Dr. Orouba taught us that we have already won the revolutions we are fighting, that the road to freedom has just only begun.
There is a key linkage Halla’s world makes between Syrian women in the Middle East and how violence follows us even upon displacement. When you are born into displacement, you enter into this planet in the physical place where you are born, while your absence enters the place where you Would Have Been Had the Violence of Displacement Not Occurred. There is a you-shaped imprint in that part of earth.
Displacement is a split, a jarring cut, when what should have Not Happened Happens. It is sick, inhumane, brutal, silent, swallowed, bloated, unholy, unspoken about ever again but everywhere. It is in our blood, in our fingernails and hair. There is a hole in the epigenetic codes that connects us to who we are. We mine our habits, interests, and affinities to track where our spirit’s parallel spirit might be. Cultural loss, displacement, none of these words are enough to describe how we are ripped from our roots. In displacement, humans become aliens. Exile creates a satellite state, where we are parallel from home, orbiting around it, never able to touch it, but broadcasting news of its struggle everywhere. Atmospheric pressure pushes us apart from the material worlds our ancestors came to migrate across and call home. There’s a scene in One Hundred Years of Solitude when the villagers of Macondo lose their ability to sleep and start to forget the names of everyday things. They label the furniture and the spoons and scrawl their names on the walls and mark everything so as not to forget. But they gradually lose the ability to decipher their own words.
Halla Barakat, October 1, 2015 ·
I was not born there, nor did I ever live there long enough to make my own memories, and those short summer memories that I had saved are slowly fading away. But I was raised to love your soil, to cherish your culture, to practice your religion and to put you after God. Your soil runs through my blood, and my ancestors will forever be from you.
No war will take that away.
In diaspora, as Syrian women, we learn to speak in so many tongues so that our daughters and their daughters do not forget the lives we lived before violence split us apart. Halla spoke French, English, and Arabic. She believed in connecting across borders and exploring what brought us to different corners of the globe. Halla and Dr. Orouba are part of a tribe of revolutionary women from the Middle East, from Africa, Asia, Latin America, of Indigeneized, Third World women activists, writers, artists, leaders, scientists, cultural workers who resist genocide from many different sides, because they live in so many different worlds.
When someone transforms your life with such incredible force, you know that person was a source of change in the world. These people come into our lives and hit us like asteroids. These people remind us of our ancestors and their friends. They reminds us to listen to the dreams that lead us to the fate we are meant to follow. And when someone is suddenly and cruelly taken away in a swift and calculated move, you know that these are the people the system is scared of most.
Halla and Dr. Orouba’s death shows how patriarchy operates across all systems of power and ultimately puts Syrian women’s bodies in the crosshairs of gender, race, class, sexuality, sect, religion, and nation. When we allow ourselves to think outside of the narrow logics of patriarchy to build an infrastructure for a revolution, it begins to encompass all struggles instead of just one. That is the work that ultimately terrifies the system. We will remember our activist revolutionary friends as they were, two women who stood deliberately outspoken against the injustices that permeate every silent and suffering corner of the world.
My father lost his closest teenage friends to forced disappearances, torture, death, and prison during 1980’s in Hafez al Assad’s Syria. I feel his loss when I think of Halla. In diaspora, the same struggles and stories unfold despite time and space. The violences our parents and grandparents endured repeat. Each event is tied to the initial Bang, but we are made to feel delusional when we connect the dots. The suffering is all kept together by silence. We go through the same things over and over without telling each other the truth. By naming our pain, we do what the system fears most — we allow ourselves to feel it, and thus we liberate ourselves.
Nine years of this tragedy in Syria has unfolded with impunity.
One loss after another. We are all in so much pain. The easiest thing to do is to swallow it. To let silence wipe away the parts of history too horrific to understand. When I mourn Halla, I also mourn the hundreds of thousands of Syrian women who died since 2011 whose names and stories we do not know. The regime took away our collective right to live, our cultural and ancestral home, our basic necessities, food, shelter, our rights to a fair and honest world.
The same way my grandmother tells me with urgency the names of our family members who suffered in political prisons, I will tell my future daughters about their Auntie Halla who was a dreamer. Who never was afraid to interrupt and to speak up and be bold and vibrant and loving to everyone she met. She is one of many causalities of the Syrian people’s longlasting struggle against a regime that has tried to erase us, and a world that has let them do so with impunity.
In Syria, even when the entire infrastructure has literally been annihilated, Syrian women are in grassroots centers, putting on plays with children and encouraging them to draw. Syrian women are in underground hospitals, refugee camps, on social media pages, building the world the regimes do not want us to. And that is the very work that the revolution failed to understand as valuable. Simply loving each other, caring for what children have to say, working together compassionately, growing plants and food when there is no longer any system in place to do that.. that is the work of the getting free…ensuring that we are drinking water, that we are eating food, telling each other stories, drawing, writing, learning, expanding our horizons, planning our designs for a better world, taking responsibility for our obligations to speak up and to always speak the truth. That is what Halla and Auntie Orouba bravely did. To quote a beloved nine year old Syrian child who spoke at our Aleppo protest in San Diego, “they can torture us, they can kill us, they can take away our homes. But they can’t take away our voices.” Halla and Dr. Orouba’s lives show that the Syrian Revolution was never over. It has actually barely just begun. In the large scale of history, we have already won. To name injustice, no matter where it occurs, in all of its forms, whether inside our homes, or outside of the streets…this is what the revolutionary Black feminist cultural worker Toni Cade Bambara said in the 1970’s when she proclaimed “The revolution starts with the self, in the self.”
Mother and daughter
Zenobia’s ancient
daughters
two of freedom’s tribe
heroes who are everyday,
around us, in the silent corners,
Displaced across space and time
Halla and Dr. Orouba, like so many brave Syrian revolutionary women, Kurdish, Circassian, Arab, Armenian, Druze, Isma’ili, Alawite, Sunni, Christians, Jewish people, Afro-Syrians, second generation Somali-Syrians, nomadic Syrians, rural, farm-working Syrians, city-Syrians, Syrians in the suburbs of every region of this blessing and hurricane of a region, disabled Syrians, queer Syrians, trans Syrians, Syrians who can no longer speak, we must listen to every single person equally if we expect ourselves to be free. We must confront the internal prejudices we hold against each other, and show mercy and compassion for our mistakes.
Halla the hazel eyes
sometimes blue like ocean waves
sometimes green like Idlib countryside
after summer rain the kind of green
that reminds me of the south
that remind you of the sun
Eyes that change colors
that takes you back in time
to your oldest memories
And makes you understand
why Fairouz sings we (you, me, alla us)
and the moon
are neighbors
Halla the hazel eyed dreamer, thank you, my first revolution sister. You taught me that a revolution with no compassion is just an empty transaction, that freedom with no laughter only lead to more massacre, and that a movement with nothing that moves you is useless. That love between a mother and daughter is a transformation itself stronger than the most violent weapons. That will last longer than lime scented
plastic a pathetic attempt
to erase your brilliant existence
This is how we liberate ourselves, little by little, with determination, love, and vision… This the invisible struggle, the “women’s work,” the real revolution taking place, the feeling of resting and feeling full. These are the women who quiet children’s nightmares and sing softly to them at night. these are the women who survive, like our ancient queen Zenobia, a woman who overturned an empire single-handedly and whose remains ISIS and the Assad regime try to bury alive in Tadmur to this day. We are Zenobia’s daughters, Syrian women, part of a lunar tribe of revolutionary women who dare to confront power at its seat. These are the women whose memories will live on in our hearts as we survive the waves of the most turbulent seas. We are responsible to our refusal to succumb to numbness and we do not let go of the possibility of being free. Our every day practices of nourishing the earth and centering our children, these are the dreams they are so terrified of us having. The ones who insist, despite mockery, that our voices pierce through the sound. We are the proclamation the sound of a crack a pause an interruption the sound of the world splitting open — we are the ones who remember, who recite injustice. We are movement towards a new day. We are the ones who are called too young, too naive, duped by our delusions of hope, these are the people the men in power are afraid of, these are the woman I pray my daughters’ and their daughters become.
We listen to the young Brown-skinned girls naming their everyday worlds with songs and creativity. We listen to the elders in our lives who have seen it all. It is the most vulnerable who learn to dream as a way out. They learn the skill of dreaming early. We tell each other, with courage, what we are going through in whatever language we have.
Violence is inherently unstable. A system built on violence will inevitably crumble, or eventually self-destruct. And when these systems fall, we will wish we spent more time articulating our dreams. We will wish we spent more time planning five years ahead, ten years ahead, one hundred… Because a power vacuum will occur, and we will need detailed plans for our freedom. Visioning and dreaming as revolutionary work is dismissed as too abstract. It is completely understandable to focus on the present, because survival is a priority. But we cannot allow ourselves to accept the conditions we live in as eternal. Every empire inevitable will fall.
Rest in Peace Halla and Dr. Orouba Barakat
diasporic Syrian activists, revolutionaries, visionaries, mother and daughter, marytrs, freedom fighters, feminists, dreamers
Writings and Media by Halla and Dr. Orouba:
Halla’s story documenting Russian airforce targeting civilians in Syria and the escalating assault on Eastern Aleppo
Her video disputing the notion that the Syrian Revolution is a “civil war”
Original video on how Assad’s military forces joined with foreign sectarian militias
Dr. Orouba’s advice to Muslim women to be great
Halla’s film review on the Last Man in Aleppo
Syria’s Yellow Tuesday: Halla’s report on the use of sarin gas in Idlib’s countryside
Halla’s article on The Free Syrian Soccer Team
How Syrians in Diaspora use Stand up Comedy to Heal from the Traumas of War
Halla’s original video documenting the bravery of the White Helmets in Idlib
Halla’s criticism of the UN
Coverage of the Lausanne meeting of October 2016
On Syrian marchers in France in solidarity with political prisoners
Ramadan in Syria’s besieged areas
Revealing the absurdity in Bashar al Assad’s PR’s stint in Ghouta
Turkey’s border policies in Syria
Her report on Afro-Germans and the history of racism in Germany
UNSC talk in Syria — much talk no action
Article on Syrians protest for Aleppo in Istanbul
Halla on Syrian girls being sex trafficked in Lebanon
She made sure people realized that Syrian refugees, contrary to popular belief, do not just fall from the sky due to inexplicable violence, but that the Assad regime’s bombardment is the root cause to what has displaced us.
On propaganda, surveillance, social media
On Ramadan in besieged areas in Syria
[1] This figure is based on the regime and Russian allied causalities from March 2011 to March 2020 according to Syrian Network for Human Rights (2020).
